


carve into my hollow chest

by kiira



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/F, road trip au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-10
Updated: 2015-09-10
Packaged: 2018-04-20 00:15:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4766294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiira/pseuds/kiira
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>buffy licks her lips and glances back at the room, something desperate in her eyes.</p><p>'i need a drink,' she manages, and grabs the keys from your hands.</p><p>///</p><p>road trip au after s7 finale</p>
            </blockquote>





	carve into my hollow chest

**Author's Note:**

> listen to drive by halsey while reading this pls

You leave in the middle of the night.

You leave in the middle of the night, and the girl next to you doesn’t even wake up. She’s new, didn’t even fight in Sunnydale, and she seems soft. Willow’s in a chair, and her girlfriend, the hot one with the tongue piercing or the nose piercing or the whatever is slumped against the door with a gun in her hand.

You always knew you liked her, even as you take the car keys from her back pocket, stick her gun in your waistband.

/

Buffy’s standing outside the motel room, and she scares the shit out of you.

She’s the only one left who can do that, and she smirks a little as you jam the gun away.

“Fuck, Buffy, I could have shot you,” and she shrugs.

“Yeah,” and doesn’t really finish her sentence, just swings her ponytail over her shoulder.

 _You didn’t_ , she seems to say, or maybe  _you wouldn’t_.

The night is cold, desert cold, and Buffy’s only in a tank top and what you think are Dawn’s shorts. Some part of you wants to offer her your jacket but you: you are not soft.

“You going somewhere?” She finally asks, jutting her chin at the keys in your hand, your boots, the way you’re on your toes.

“No,” except you’re a terrible liar, especially to her.

The neon motel sign buzzes, the vacancy sign flickering on and off and on and off and on and off until ––

Buffy licks her lips and glances back at the room, something desperate in her eyes.

“I need a drink,” she manages, and grabs the keys from your hands.

/

You drive; Buffy’s hands are shaking.

/

The sun’s rising in Arizona when she turns to you with a cheery grin and suggests breakfast.

It’s not for another hour that you find a diner by the side of the road, and diner would be on the generous side of the spectrum. Buffy hops out of the car, and puts her hair back up into a ponytail.

It’s close to ninety degrees out, and she’s still shivering –– you buy her pancakes with money you stole from Willow and wonder how you got here.

Buffy flirts with the waitress, and gets directions to the nearest town, ten gallons of gas and the girl’s phone number. You’re not sure whether to be amused or jealous; you can still feel your gun pressing against the small of your back.

She falls asleep in the sunlight and you could think she almost smiled.

/

Willow calls you on Buffy’s cell after thirty-seven hours, and Buffy ignores the call. You call Willow in the next town on a pay phone and she starts yelling at you.

“Where did you take her, Faith, I swear to god, if you talked her into going somewhere – ”

You mostly start tuning her out – you were sixteen and scared and that’s how they’re all going to remember you forever.

After you let her get good and angry, you just hang up. The only one of them you can handle talking to for more than a couple minutes is Dawn, and she didn’t even really exist the first time around.

Buffy turns the corner and sees you at the phone booth; her smile hardens.

“Let’s go,” she snaps, and when you get into the car she refuses to talk until sunset.

/

It’s not until somewhere in Colorado that you get to use the gun; it’s not until Colorado that the violence catches up to you.

The vampire practically jumps you, and your heart is pounding before you can even start to register the situation, you have the gun pressed to its head, trigger squeezed even as Buffy’s screaming “Stake, Faith, stake,” at you.

It’s her who has to kill it, pull a stake from some pocket of the backpack she picked up in Utah and shove it into the thing’s unbeating heart.

“What the  _fuck_ , Faith,” she spits out, blonde hair in her eyes, your gun in her hands, “what the actual fuck?”

It’s her turn to shove the gun into her waistband (you probably need a better place to put it) and she takes the keys from you.

“I panicked,” you try to her back, except she’s too far away to hear you, and you’re not entirely sure you even speak.

She’s turned the car around by the time you get to her, and your gun is sitting on the center console, accusing, guilty.

“Don’t fucking touch that,” she says, doesn’t look at you, and in the same breath, “what  _happened_  to you?”

“I dunno,” you try, and Buffy starts the engine again.

It’s not until you’re half asleep in the passenger seat that she tries talking again, your gun rattling between you.

“I’m sorry, you know, about everything that happened senior year. I never wanted anything to actually happen to you,” and you laugh.

“You tried to kill me, babe,” and you meant it as a joke, except she makes a kind of choked sobbing noise.

No one talks after that because: Buffy can’t drive if she’s crying, because: you can’t sleep without a gun under your pillow.

/

In the empty stretch of land between Kansas and Missouri she claimed your leather jacket as her own, the hazy lines between you stretched.

/

“Do we have enough for a motel room?” and most night you don’t (in some towns you pick up odd jobs; washing dishes, babysitting, mowing lawns).

Most nights you sleep in the car, her head on your shoulder, you slumped over in her lap; wake up with her nervous fingers tapping out a rhythm on your spine, her lips pressed against your shoulder. It becomes normal – Buffy buys a blanket in a Walmart in Iowa, and it’s everything you would have probably wanted out of a quilt at eight years old, light pink with white polka dots.

Buffy’s smirking as she shows it to you, so you make her carry it around all day, remind her that she’s older than you are and if anyone could get away with buying this monstrosity it would be you.

“After all,” you remind her, “I am the only one here who just turned legal to drink,” and Buffy’s face falls.

You’re practically the same age as her – twenty-one to her twenty-three – but she did the math once, figured out you weren’t even seventeen when you first met her. And she was eighteen then, still a kid too, but somehow she feel responsible.

(The night she figured it all out she looked at you with big eyes, “You were younger than Dawn,” and everything in you wanted to let her forget).

“Sorry,” you whisper to her, “I forgot,” and she shakes her head.

“Not really your fault,” and it’s not hers either.

You just curl your fingers into hers, hold her hand as you walk down a dusty nowhere street.

/

“Are you ever gonna go back, B?” You ask her one night, after she’s curled up in your lap in the backseat. You’re combing your fingers through her hair, and she stiffens slightly.

“New topic,” she singsongs and you flip the light on.

“We can’t keep running forever,” and she shrugs, your hands tangled in her hair.

“We  _can’t_ ,” you insist again, and responsibility feels heavy on your tongue.

“We can try,” she whispers, and presses a kiss to your hip.

You turn the light back off because if you don’t you’re not sure whether you would kiss her or push her off. She falls asleep; you trace the shape of your gun in the seat pocket.

/

“I called Dawn today,” she says in Pennsylvania.

When you kiss her, you can taste salt.

**Author's Note:**

> come hang out @ bettymcraae.tumblr.com


End file.
